When ETC is on the bar, the toll card is displayed, which only shows the type of ETC card used by the car. There are two kinds of ETC cards, one is the stored value card and the other is the recharge card. The stored-value card deposits money first, and the corresponding expenses are deducted directly from the stored-value card when it is exported. If the balance of the stored value card is insufficient, you can't get through. Rechargeable cards do not need to be recharged in advance. It is only charged when passing the bar, and the fee needs to be repaid by the owner later, which is the form of credit card. Nowadays, ETC mostly uses charge cards.

Electronic toll collection (ETC) is one of the service functions of intelligent transportation system, which is especially suitable for use in highway or bridge and tunnel environment with heavy traffic. There is a special ETC toll collection channel at the expressway toll collection office. As long as the owner installs an induction card on the front windshield of the vehicle and pre-stores the fees, there is no need to pay or stop manually when passing through the toll booth, and the high-speed toll will be automatically deducted from the card, which can realize automatic charging.

This charging system charges less than two seconds for each car, and the capacity of the charging channel is 5 to 10 times that of the manual charging channel. The use of automatic electronic toll collection system can make expressway toll collection move towards paperless and cashless management, fundamentally put an end to the loss of toll tickets and solve the financial management confusion in expressway toll collection. In addition, the implementation of fully automatic electronic toll collection system can also save capital construction costs and management costs.

The system needs to install vehicle-mounted equipment carrying vehicle information on the vehicle. When the vehicle enters the entrance of the non-stop electronic toll collection channel, the station-level equipment of the expressway data acquisition and processing system reads the vehicle information in the vehicle-mounted equipment, calls up the matching vehicle data from the database, publishes, stores the records and uploads them to the data management center of the expressway data acquisition and processing system. The data management center analyzes the passing vehicles, forms a deduction transaction and uploads it to the bank in real time, and the bank returns to the data management center in real time after completing the transaction processing.